Dans la nuit froide de l'oubli

2007-10-22

Dans la nuit froide de l'oubli

This late-autumn tanka was penned by by SONE no Yoshitada (曽根好忠) and can be found in the Shin Kokinshū:

人は来ず風に木の葉は散りはてて夜な夜な蟲の聲弱るなり

Hito wa kozu/ Kaze ni konoha wa/ chirihatete/ yonayona mushi no/ koe yowaru nari
People do not call/ The leaves have blown away in the wind/ And every night the cries of the insects seem weaker

This poem is an excellent example of Shin-kokin-chō (新古今調, "Shin Kokinshū tone") in many ways: its twilight-of-the-nobles feel, its phantasmagoric rather than direct emotional use of the natural world, even its 1-4 structure (breaks after the first five-syllable ku).

Mind you, Yoshitada wrote it more than a century before the SK editors were even born. He was ahead of his time. Pessimists often are.

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Aurelio Asiain:

Beautiful poem. Almost two centuries after Yoshitada, Minamoto no Sanetomo wrote an allusive variation:

秋はいぬ風に木の葉は散りはてて山さびしかる冬はきにけり

Do you have any particular reason to translate "人は来ず" as "people do not call" and not "people do not come"?

Matt:

Basically I just didn't like "People do not come" as a line; I felt like it needed some indication of _where_ to work in English, as it stands. "People do not call" isn't a great translation either, though, but I was trying to stick to the original shape.. perhaps "No one comes"?

Aurelio Asiain:

Well, the problem with "call" is one immediately thinks in a telephone call.... And "no one comes" is too short. How about "no one visits me"?

Matt:

That works in isolation, but then you have the problem of what to say when the source is 訪はむ... ;)

I see your problem with "call" -- it is an interesting one. It didn't have that association for me because I was so deeply involved in the context, I suppose -- I was reading 1000-year-old poems during most of my free time that day.

2007-10-22